Pressure is building up for the creation of massive animal
processing plants in the UK to replace traditional dairy and pig production,
despite concerns about water pollution, animal welfare, environmental damage
and the wiping out of small farms.
Farmers’ leader Peter Kendall claims large scale
installations are essential to feed the population and keep food prices down.
He wants permission to be given for a 1,000-cow unit in Powys and a 2,500 pig
farm in Derbyshire.
Bigger farms are more profitable and can therefore afford
better equipment, more space and experts able "to protect the environment
and animals", he claims in the face of all the evidence.
That includes recent allegations of horrific abuse
at pig farms in the US
and a new report showing that most intensive farms in the EU are not sticking
to agreed welfare standards.
The government also believes that intensification is needed
to cope with population increase, climate change and other factors and is
waiting for a working group to report.
All this is, in fact, hogwash. The intensive farming of
livestock is not a contribution to ending world hunger and climate change - it
is a net contributor to both.
The industrial model, far from being the answer is actually
hugely wasteful. Factory farms are food consumers, not food producers. A recent
UN food security report says: “When livestock are raised in intensive systems,
they convert carbohydrates and protein that might otherwise be eaten directly
by humans and use them to produce a smaller quantity of energy and protein. In
these situations, livestock can be said to reduce the food balance."
In other words, intensive animal rearing puts farm animals
in competition with people for food, and as Compassion
in World Farming reports, it is people who are losing out.
- For every 6kg of plant protein such as cereals fed to
livestock, only 1kg of protein on average is given back in the form of meat or
other livestock products.
- for every 100 food calories of edible crops fed to
livestock, we get back just 30 calories as meat and milk - a 70% loss.
- One third of the world’s cereal harvest is fed to farm
animals. If this were fed to people, it could feed 3 billion.
- Up to one third of the world’s landed fish catch never
reaches a human mouth, much of it is diverted to feed farmed fish, pigs or
poultry.
- One third of food produced globally for human consumption
is lost or wasted. In the EU, we waste up to half our food. That’s enough to
feed the world’s hungry many times over.
The biggest intensive unit in the world is the Al Safi Dairy
Farm, in Saudi Arabia ,
an underground bunker where 24,000 cattle who never see the sun produce 12 5million
litres of milk a year. Hog plants in the US can have as many as 10,000 pigs
and in the EU the majority of pigs are now intensively farmed.
This is not a sentimental issue, though the denaturing of
animals rightly fills most people with disgust. It is to do with the future of
life on the planet. Huge swathes of virgin forest continue to be cleared to
grow soya, which is fed to cattle. Their waste is not recycled into the food
product cycle and so the whole process becomes an absolute loss to the planet's
ecology.
It is incredible that nature's best waste munchers - the pig
and chicken - are being fed pure grain in intensive systems. Within mixed
farming they would be far more environmentally useful.
In the UK
over 800 million meat chickens are reared each year. Keeping them free range
would need an area around a third of the size of the Isle
of Wight , less than one thousandth of the nation’s total farmland.
Integrating them within mixed farming systems would benefit production, sustainability
- and the chickens. We need to take the profit out of food and tell the
National Farmers Union and agri-business to take a running jump.
Penny Cole
Environment editor
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